Flight Path Reconstruction for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Using Low-Cost Sensors

This paper shows how low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors can be used to reconstruct the position, velocity, andattitude ofan aircraft. An extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel Smoother is usedoffline to extract state information from recorded rawdata signals. Some of the inherently large errors of low-cost sensors are determined by means ofa Maximum-Likelihoodscheme. The applicability of this approach is shown using simulated as well as real data from a low cost flying test-bed, equipped with sensors obtainedfromtheRCmodelmarket. In bothcases, results are very promising. The proposed algorithm thus constitutes a possibility ofobtaining highaccuracy estimates ofthe true state trajectories for analysis andmodeling.     «

This paper shows how low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors can be used to reconstruct the position, velocity, andattitude ofan aircraft. An extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel Smoother is usedoffline to extract state information from recorded rawdata signals. Some of the inherently large errors of low-cost sensors are determined by means ofa Maximum-Likelihoodscheme. The applicability of this approach is shown using simulated as well as real data from a low cost flying test-bed, equipped with sensors obtain...     »